Present: Jonathan Blaney [minutes], Josh Cowls, Helen Hockx-Yu, Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, Peter Webster, Jane Winters
Table of Contents
1 Minutes of the previous meeting
Accepted as a correct record.
2 Matters arising
The BL has supplied the data on UK TripAdvisor that had been wanted by the OII and the process had not taken very much time.
3 Institutional updates
3.1 BL
The group agreed that the interface was working really well as of that morning: search and trend were really quite fast and some of the previous glitches are now working fantastically. Someone from Denmark had been looking at performance on Solr large scale indexes and has worked two days on the project and had provided suggestions for reducing search time.
After the January bursary meeting the BL had checked through the remaining problems and had prioritised the problem of CSV output of sets not working.
3.2 OII
The green light on the book is expected imminently and OII will concentrate on the book once approved. Various OII researchers are working on chapters.
3.3 IHR
A few queries about the case studies have been received and a draft from one researcher already. A meeting with another researcher had been arranged. The group agreed that it had been a good idea to send citation guidance: some people had not realised you need to cite screenshots.
4 Budgets
Because of the constraints of the funding allocation all invoices needed to be processed by the end of March. This includes travel for the Stanford conference in April, which is unfortunate.
The group discussed sources of funding for the Open Access fee of £5,000. This cannot be paid for from the project budget.
5 Communication and publicity
The project’s panel at the IIPC in Stanford has been accepted. Various project members will take part.
Various papers will be accepted with the June conference in Aarhus. Various people have had problems logging in to the Aarhus system.
The session at the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer school has been accepted; the workshops have been approved but nothing much has been heard since then, in terms of details.
The project will be mentioned in a paper at UCL digital humanities seminar next week and at a talk as part of a digital panel at the Senate House History open day, aimed at postgraduates and early-career researchers.
There is an article in the New Yorker this week, which mentions the project and quotes Gareth Millward.
The project was discussed at the Association of Social Science Librarians at Senate House and at a talk at the Houses of Parliament. There will soon be an Oxford-wide seminar on web archiving; the project will be mentioned frequently.
The project will be mentioned in a paper at the ICWSM conference in Oxford in May, on religion and social media.
6 The videos: final sign-off
The first video has been put on YouTube. The team approved putting the second and final video on YouTube as well.
7 Online learning materials
The group agreed that a number of learning materials have been developed as part of the project: the bibliography, films, slides, case studies and blog posts. It would be good to make this a structured module later but there is no time within the current project.
8 The book
One more review is awaited but have had two very positive ones. Both reviewers said that the book is rather UK-centric and all centred on rich countries in the global north. Unfortunately there appears to be little going on elsewhere. There is one chapter about Islamic sites from an American perspective, but even that is not very non-western. There are French, Danish and US chapters, but then the proposal does give flexibility to address the gap. The group agreed that that gap can be addressed in the introduction but that all would continue to look out for any non-western web archiving activities.
Josh Cowls will distil the findings of the bursary holders’ reports into an overarching chapter. He will liaise with the individual researchers about how he does this and the use he makes of their research.
9 Future funding applications or other plans
The group discussed an AHRC Networks application, a Horizon 2020 application coordinated by RESAW and the possibility of a Leverhulme application.
10 Any other business
The group decided to try to reconvene the big data ethics panel that was held at the December conference. The IHR’s Digital History seminar was mooted as a forum for this.